High In The Hills, O'er the Mountain of Bones
by sunshine and lollipops
Summary: "High in the hills, o'er the mountains of bones, Jorah would live with his ghosts" or…Jorah lives through the Long Night and becomes a hermit in the Bone Mountains.


**Author's Note: **Another one-shot gift for salzrand (I owe her about a zillion of them) and obviously also for the rest of my #Jorleesi fam (*HUGS*) though I'll warn you…this one's less about the fluff and more about the *sad feels*…though Jorah's hair is fluffy and ummm, hello hermi d, so not a complete waste of your time, I hope :)

Like I said, it's a one-shot. But I'm not sure if I'm finished with this idea yet. Hermit Jorah is _such _an aesthetic that might require further exploration at a later date #BeardStudies ;)

_**High in the Hills, O'er the Mountains of Bones**_

Not long after the bells of King's Landing tolled their final dirge…

Jon Snow was slain. For the second time in his life. This time it was justice, not mutiny, but the blood on his tongue tasted just as sour.

_Gods, just let it end…_he prayed bitterly.

And it did. The last dragon, Rhaegar Targaryen's trueborn _son,_ bled out on the cold, crusty snows of the North and this time, he stayed dead. It was a clean death, even if given by his own sword. He was disarmed in single combat and the man who disarmed him picked up Longclaw with as strong and familiar a grip as anyone alive.

For it was once _his_ sword too.

There might have been poetic justice in that, but what hideous poetry it turned out to be.

If she had waited…if she had _just_ waited until he was mended, perhaps none of this would have happened. But Jorah Mormont lay too near death after the battle with the dead, unconscious for weeks, wounded beyond an ordinary man's repair.

But Jorah was no ordinary man, for ordinary men have never heard baby dragons singing in the desert or fought thousands of dead men under a night sky painted grey with snow and ash. Against all odds, he lived. He lived and opened his eyes on a world in which Daenerys Targaryen no longer drew breath. She'd been murdered, stabbed by Jon Snow in the south, her lifeless body taken by Drogon far beyond the known realms of men.

Jorah had been told what Daenerys did while he lay dead to the world, convalescing in the upper chambers of the Stark castle. _The Mad Queen_, they whispered throughout the hallways of Winterfell and shook their heads ruefully, but righteously too—as if they always knew, as if it was always meant to be.

No, it wasn't meant to be. Damn the Gods, damn her Targaryen blood, damn the _bells_—it wasn't supposed to end like this.

And even if he could manage to reconcile the northerner's faithless words with the Daenerys he knew. The Daenerys he _loved. _It wouldn't have mattered. Even if he saw her commit those crimes with his own eyes, he feared it wouldn't have mattered at all.

Jorah's fate was sealed a long time ago. Before the battle with the dead, before Dragonstone, Meereen, Qarth and all those long days and nights traversing the Great Grass Sea. His soul was seared with the dragon girl's years ago, by fire and blood—the fires that refused to burn her and the blood he shed in her service. Without her, his soul was severed and rootless. Without her, he might as well be dust.

But upon waking and being told that the man who killed her still lived, he knew there was one final act of love and loyalty that he could perform for her, even if she'd never know it was done.

And it had to be done.

Jon seemed to know it was coming. When Jorah Mormont showed up at Castle Black, Jon must have known. They were too alike, wasn't that why she was drawn to Jon in the first place? He had reminded her of her northern bear, her steadfast knight, but younger and alive—for when she allowed her heart soften towards Jon Snow, she didn't know if Jorah Mormont were still living or dead.

Both men betrayed her. But the first, owed her nothing and saved her too many times to count. The second, owed her everything and stabbed her through the heart.

So Jorah killed the Stark boy or Targaryen boy, wolf or dragon or whatever he was in the end, and regretted only that he hadn't done it sooner, when they travelled above the Wall to hunt the wights and spoke over his father's sword like near brothers.

With the task done, Jorah might have joined the Night's Watch himself, but it was a hollow calling now, with the White Walkers defeated, the wildlings considered comrades and winter already thawing into spring. He might have turned the sword on himself, as he had considered it once before, in that cramped, dark cell in the Citadel, after the greyscale had covered his chest and shoulders, spreading wildly, while he still had the mind to do it…

Yes, he considered it. And as he stood over Jon's lifeless body, he considered it again. He even turned the blade in his hand, gaze drawn to the wolf pommel with its dark eyes peering back at him severely. But it was _her_ voice that echoed on the edge of the chilled spring breeze and said only:

_Please don't, Jorah…if you loved me at all, please don't. I can't have your blood on my hands with the rest. Not yours. I couldn't bear it._

And her voice seemed so near and so real, as if she stood by his side again. Not the Mad Queen's voice, laced in the oaths and cadence of High Valyrian, but Daenerys's from long ago, when she was still just an exiled princess, asking hesitant questions about a home she didn't remember, violet eyes sparking with innocence and sweetness, eager for his answers.

_What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?_

He lowered the sword, finally.

Not long after, Jorah Mormont boarded a ship at White Harbor and was never seen on the western shores again.

* * *

The Bone Mountains towered over the Essosi plain like giants, clawing up from the dusty wilds of the Red Waste in the west, and Jogos Nhai in the east. Its massive ridges were flanked on both the north and south by the churning sea. Its summits reached up towards the rafters of heaven, the highest peaks lost in the smoky clouds above.

"A thousand roads lead into the Bones, but only three lead out." This was a common saying in the East, spoken as a warning to those who might attempt an ill-advised crossing through the plunging ravines, deep woods and snowy peaks.

Some of those paths led to sheer and sudden cliffs, with white bones scattered thousands of meters below. Some led deep into tangled glens, where briars and branches would close in on the traveler, content to keep their prize locked in a thorny embrace until they rotted away to dust and mud. Others led even deeper, to the very roots of the mountain, where old shadows thrived. And where, it was said, even the gods dared not venture.

Jorah didn't care what the wise men said. If it was a warning, they could keep it. When he went up into the Bone Mountains, he didn't care if he ever came down again.

He would welcome death whenever it sought fit to take him. But he sought penance too, as only a life of solitude and silence can grant. And part of him felt the need to keep on living, if only because there was no one else in the world who would remember her as she was, young and vibrant, with a heart as gentle as a mother's kiss.

He built himself a small house on the side of a green mountain, hewn from rough stones and overlooking a slope of meadows that bloomed with violet flowers in the spring and indigo in the summer. Both shades reminded him of her. But didn't everything?

Jorah exchanged his armor for wool and linen. With the same coin that Tyrion Lannister had once given him for luck, he bought three lambs off a shepherd in the valley. Longclaw remained wrapped in cloth, hidden away in a chest, exchanged for a shepherd's crook. Jorah would stand high on the meadows, weathered hands resting on the head of that staff, as he watched his small flock of black-and-white speckled sheep graze along the mountain side.

His hair and beard grew out again, turning redder under the warm rays of the eastern sun and blown soft around his ears by mountain air.

His body had been forced through more than most men would face in five lifetimes and yet he remained strong, his Mormont vitality grafted onto his bones. It took an undead giant to kill the smallest Mormont and a murder of crows to take down his father. He would go no easier.

_More's the pity…_he thought for a long time.

But as the horrors that he'd faced across the sea became more and more distant memories, he felt weights lifting, the piercing agony of it all smoothing down to a dull…ache. Sanded down with sadness.

Wistful even, for what might have been. Jorah's life story was written in ink that begged what might have been. And he wasn't the only one.

Once in a while he'd see a familiar shadow pass over the mountain side, with a wingspan that spread over the cerulean sky with leather wings outstretched in the thin air above.

Jorah would cast his gaze heavenward to catch sight of the dragon's underbelly. Drogon's black scales gleamed in sunlight as the creature soared through the highest thermals. Jorah didn't know how the dragon had found him or why he sought him out but he'd seen enough to know that some things were beyond the knowledge of mortal men.

_Like baby dragons curled up together and sleeping in the desert, their scales painted in black and gold and green. _

Jorah could bring that particular memory to mind with little trouble, as Daenerys's wide grin always came with it. She used to watch the dragons sleep with wonder written across her features. And then she would turn to him to ask: _Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?_

Did Drogon remember her smile too? Perhaps they were both drawn to this place for the same reason. To forget, no. To _remember._

For the mountains kept all memories close, safely tucked away in its dark glens and old forests, hidden under moss and lichen-covered rocks, stashed away in the wide grooves of tree bark. Time moved at a strange pace here, with only the violet sunrise and golden sunset marking a passage of days. At times, Jorah wondered if time hadn't stopped altogether.

He felt older than he'd ever been and yet somehow, the mountains preserved him, as he was, as he had been.

Had Daenerys walked up into those mountains, she would have known him at once, nearly unchanged from the man she met all those years ago in Pentos.

_If only that were so, my princess…_

Jorah, for his part, would not be surprised to find her there. At least, not as surprised as he should have been.

Jenny of Oldstones wasn't the only one who lived with ghosts. And though there were many that might choose to haunt him, it was Daenerys who did it best. There wasn't a day that passed by when he didn't catch a glimpse of her in the meadow, dressed in blue and white, or hear her voice on the breeze, soft and effervescent. She hovered nearby, even as he held a newborn lamb in his arms, or split wood above the house, or took a bottle of highland whiskey up to the peak, to get drunk as the sun sank slowly beneath the mountain pass.

_I never knew you to drink, Ser._

_I never knew you to die, Khaleesi._

He rose every morning and went to bed every night with the contours of her face and silver-blonde shade of her hair flashing at the edges of consciousness.

She would laugh in his dreams, running along the sloping meadows, with her hair free of its many braids, worn down and loose around her shoulders. She would tease him, as she had not done since they lived in the great pyramid at Meereen, and she would reach up and run her fingers along the side of his jaw, playing with the red-blond whiskers she found there.

_My bear, you need a shave…_she'd say.

She'd laugh again. And he felt her ghostly kiss linger at the side of his mouth, almost as real as the one that she'd pressed against his cheek the night they burned Khal Drogo's body.

Then, she would take his hand and lead him up further into the mountains, climbing through old forest paths until they reached the cliff side, where they would stand, like dragons at the zenith of their mountain perch. A lush valley land spread out far below, a secret haven, ringed by mountains on all sides. They looked down on sapphire blue lakes and green woods beyond, snow-peaked mountains that faded off into a horizon made up of silver stars on a blue-black canvas.

That's where she would turn and say to him, "Have you ever seen anything more beautiful, Jorah?"

"One thing,"he always answered her with a melancholy whisper, his eyes never straying too far from her face, despite the vista before them. He was captivated by the way the hushed breeze danced in the long strands of her hair. She reached up and gathered her hair to one side, but a few strands were too wild to tame. She shrugged with another grin, helpless to keep them in place.

If he reached out to brush those strands back behind her ear, he was worried the spell would break and she would vanish. Even while she was living, he could never quite believe she was real.

In the distance, he heard Drogon's screeching call, echoing across the gash of valley, reminding him that some miracles do exist. No matter how unlikely.

He murmured again, "Only one thing, _Khaleesi_…"

She turned her brilliant smile on him, almost shyly, knowing what he meant by the way he said it. Her smile was too inviting, even obscured by those wayward strands which continued to fall across her violet eyes so prettily.

Taking the chance, he stretched out his hand.


End file.
